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Preparing for any test is vital to your chances of success. The UKCAT is a test based on aptitude, and in the early days of the UKCAT the UKCAT consortium believed that since the test is a test of your intelligence you would not need to prepare for it. Years of successively improved scores have proven to the UKCAT consortium that this is not the case, so you are now expected to prepare thoroughly for your test. In a test such as the UKCAT, where you are being tested on skills rather than knowledge, practice tests can have real benefits when you enter that test room. Let’s take a quick look at what these benefits are, one by one. Practising familiarises you with the types of questions you can expect in the test. This in turn gives you confidence that you know how to handle this type of question, and indeed the whole test. Familiarity with the questions means that you can work through them quicker as you don’t need to spend time understanding what to do. The quicker you work through each question the more questions you will answer, giving you the opportunity to get a better score in the test. Practising improves the skills being tested. This can include refreshing a skill you have not used in a while, or learning new skills entirely. Improving these skills increases your accuracy when answering questions (how many questions you attempt and get right), in turn also leading to a better score. By taking practice tests you can learn tricks for identifying patterns in the language of the questions or in the shapes of the abstract reasoning questions. Learning these tricks makes it easier to get the questions right. In addition you can then work out the solving strategies that work best for you, enabling you to be more efficient at answering the questions. Performing calculations such as percentages and ratios over and over again conditions you to know what you need to do the next time. This means that pulling up the formulas (percentage increase/ decrease) will take less time, making the calculations and answering questions quicker. Practice helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses. In turn this helps focus your preparation as you work to strengthen your weaknesses to get better scores in the test. You would never dream of going in to any other test without revising and taking practice and mock tests. The UKCAT is no exception even if it is a different type of test than you are used to. Make sure that you give yourself a long enough preparation period in order that you get the most out of your practice, and that you complete everything you need to do. Find out more about how to prepare for your UKCAT with JobTestPrep.